Top 10 VFX Scenes of 2009

In the year of the great recession, Hollywood blockbusters went bigger. There were taller Transformers, wider tidal waves, and, in the case of Avatar, more dimensions with which to pummel your brain. The running times were bigger, too—of the ten movies we selected for their landmark visual-effects (VFX) scenes, five were more than two-and-a-half hours long. Call it the year of the VFX epic, or maybe the year of the director's cut. We watched every bloated minute of it, arguably more on-screen carnage than any other year at the movies. And after crawling out from under the digital wreckage of one antimatter bomb, two destroyed aircraft carriers, countless leveled cities and no less than three planets painstakingly torn apart, we're happy to report that CGI can sometimes conjure up some swell-looking alien faces, too. Here are the best VFX scenes of 2009 (about half of which are spoilers, so consider yourself alerted).